fayyazkl

Yeah this will definitely do that. Only that mentioning name per file is painful. In large source trees, you often exactly don't know which files have been modified. You just have been following through a debug path making changes where needed. Just having the ability to checkout a folder down the hierarchy is really handy. Git recently added "sparse checkouts" but still they only solve the problem partially

Yeah Exactly. Probably i should have worded more appropriately. But given the fact that most of software developers have to maintain large existing code bases, tailor a specific subsection to achieve a goal and only need to commit just a folder in that sub section

Oh, i meant the other 20 files all around the code base have just been changed to get my local setup to work. There is no way (without sub branching) in git to have a lot of modified files, but only wanting to revert the ones actually being worked upon. Core concept was still shallow check out in case of svn

Loved the part regarding sooo much to type. I learned svn in probably in my first job and after a while, commands just came natural to me both linux command line or toroise svn via GUI. But git which i only learned a couple years back still haunts me in the sense of writing a long command with several parameters to achieve some thing where i have to understand each param and its application in my given scenario. Just a week back, i spent like 30 min getting code base back to the state of some one doing an equivalent of svn update and i was like... Why did we ditch svn?

Not an option if the rest of code base is likely different from the original cloned from. For me, this very often has been the case i.e. small changes in like may be 20 files scattered all over the code base just to get my copy run in a specific way debugging an issue.

It is not just about being harder to understand. I would say it is partially self contradicting. First, it teaches you to unlearn the centralized vc. But i am yet to see a commercial git repo which doesn't maintain a central branch. The amount of confusion it puts an average developer into, specially if they are coming from subversion background does eat a lot of energy. I bet the person making the decision to switch to git, didn't foresee that (i didn't). Otherwise, you always would question if it is worth the trouble maintaining the project. Having said that, although there are countless benefits of git, but the one that truly makes it worthwhile in my scenario was the difference in merging capability. SVN needs to go a really long way even to be competitive there.

Exactly! Also imagine the situation when you only were working inside one source folder in a large code base, changed 3-4 files significantly and latter decided to revert back to original ones. It just takes svn revert -r revision in that folder to get back original files. With git you can't get away without having to create subtree first

Nucleus pretty much comprises of a very small foot print. With Architecture specific assembly isolated from like 95% of the code neatly. Rest is Ansi C. It contains tasks which are sort of equivalent of kernel level threads in POSIX but implementation logic is quite different i.e. RTOS constraints are handled by classifying interrupts at two levels. In terms of constraints, there is no dynamic loading i.e. you have to build a single binary. But at the same time it was pretty fascinating with os, networking stack, drivers all contained in a separate folder building up one project. Lately they have added power management, Android like UI and even some hyper-visor support. Most importantly, it is small and consistent enough for a programmer willing to learn through the entire stack. Helps with much better visualization from hardware to application. A couple of former colleagues (one of which incidentally now works with QNX and hence compared both) highlights both i.e. strengths vs weaknesses of each. But it didn't feel like one was superior to another. However, Nucleus severely lacks any certifications (and ability) to get into HARD real time industry such as aviation.

Often the RTOS is not exactly free, but not entirely closed either. A while back, i used to work on Nucleus RTOS by Mentor Graphics with a pretty impressive global foot print http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_RTOS. It used to be sold as an api (with source code given to customers) who developed applications based upon it. I have written portions (IPsec/IKE, SNMP, Ipv6) of its networking stack and at least all of its customers have access to source code. It is pretty well written with very decent coding conventions and can be compared to any good well known open source project (VLC, even Linux kernel). Then there are others such as Wind River's VxWorks among the more popular ones. Though i am not very sure of its licensing model, but it is pretty well recognized and established in the embedded world. Just that these are not as well known in the over all software community but rather more restricted towards those in the embedded industry.

Not exactly full time remote work, but i believe i can get into one if wanted and approach is nevertheless the same.

I sort of got into part time work via odesk, in addition to a full time day job. Initially the motivation was money, but very soon i realized multiple other aspects of it i.e. i used to work for a large MNC back then as a day job with very long dev cycles and organized work schedules. I learned the skill to work under pressure of a day or two or night and quickly deliver things that JUST WORK or being able to learn some thing needed very fast. Also i got a chance to broaden my skill set a lot by working on any project that interested me. So i still continue to do that on and off. This also provided me a chance to work with several open source projects (vlc, dnrd, kannel, netsnmp) and still make money. So i continue to do it still for all of the above reasons.

How i got into it in the first place? Took tests and scored well in areas i claimed skills in, charged a lot less initially, under promised and over deliverd to earn very good feedback, started with small jobs. Once i got a client satisfied with small jobs, they came back with bigger ones latter. Gradually increased rates and maintained an online profile i.e. public domain code written by one's self among other things. During all this, i even had an option to work full time dedicated to some body for a long time with good money. Just couldn't find enough time i.e. didn't feel like leaving existing job and go in.

With remote work, you get to manage your own schedule. But it is harder to be organized and you need more effort to justify time spent achieving a goal vs when sitting in an office.

The challenge in latter parts of life (when you have young kids) is to be able to find enough time to work when you are physically active i.e. sitting late night on a sofa after kids being asleep with laptop doesn't work very well.

Forgot to mention that this whole effort sort of reduced the fear of being jobless since one becomes more confident about your possible prospects of work whether local full time or remote. For this reason every one should work this way at least for some time in life IMHO.

Finally some one pointed out the importance of the ability to actually code and produce something that works. Algorithmic problem solving ability is far less utilized in actual every day job compared to being able to code. Just imagine how much of your math skills did you actually need going well through all those bad experiences? Would you still be considered slow learner and fired if you knew how to code pretty well but just wasn’t so good at figuring out shortest path in a graph. Isn’t it possible to know the CS basics well i.e. familiar with complexity, big Os, basic data structures and sorting and being able to learn any advanced standard algo when needed by looking it up? Just wondering….

This misses a couple of factors. a) Not every one is based in US, so they charge viewing their currency rate diff. Hence 15k USD per annum might be a good income for some one in a remote country. b) Not every one is a full time free lancer. For instance i only work free lance, when i have time, got a really interesting project or am in need of money apart from a full time day job. Some times i have like 15 hours worked in six months, some times more. I don't see any way to even point out those things here. Won't these drastically impact the data?

P.S. yes - another missed factor is years of experience - No? If you get mostly people right out of college (or even in college for that matter) making similar to those on full time jobs after many years, that is an interesting one too. No?

I would like to add that apart from being professionally chosen or not, this sort of opens up a way for learning web dev concepts for those who learned programming with c as the first language. They just get to see internals of all libraries quickly rather than having lots of frameworks with no easy access to source to see what is going on underneath. Good idea.

Exactly, the same thing i am wondering. AES is symmetric. So same key is used for encryption and decryption against RSA which is asymmetric. So putting key on website is effectively the same as not encrypting at all. Did i miss any thing here?

things like these and also those similar to having googled words such as "pressure cooker" and "bomb" at some point on my machine in the US and being thwarted by a SWAT team at some point, really scares some one to even be in the US because he would have all the convincing signs like a beard, being a Muslim and might actually have to fast.

While i fully agree with the position of author not being responsible entirely, i find it hard to believe it happened the way it appears to be.

It could be but there are bunch of loopholes. - I can believe that he was lousy enough to click no "delete" on users table. I can believe that he when the dialog box asked "are you sure you want to drop this table" he clicked yes. I can believe that after deleting he "committed" the transaction. But what i can't believe that the database let him delete a table which was base for every other table implemented by a Foriegn key constraint ? It could be argued that due to efficiency they hadn't put constraints on the table but it's hard to digest.

Probably the story is some what tailored to fit to a post.

I think it was just an over all generalization. I wrote my opinion based upon reading this article and i am not even remotely doing a web app for over 7 years. It is mostly embedded / networks / c. Still i didn't feel like he was talking about web apps only. Full stack - front vs back end are standard terms often mentioned in recruiting at all big name companies as well as startups

I don't see what is wrong with having interest in one area say back end, having done it most of the time during your experience and hence have more relevant material on your profile. But still being open and able to do front end when needed. However, clearly lack enough exposure or substance on paper for that. To me it is the resistance to do any thing different from previous experience that is the culprit. Not the basic classification

There is still a lot to admire. A few days back i pulled all of my email to Thunderbird only to discover a few differences between g vs hot mail.

No pop account in hotmail, effectively every read message still appears unread in the online email client. By default hotmail had an option checked to "leaving only 14 days of email online". All the rest was virtually deleted and therefore existed only on my computer. There was an insane plugin to submit those all back to inbox without disturbing dates or subjects. However, that only resulted in hotmail access being revoked after 150 or so emails since there is some sort of cap on pushing emails at once to your account. The gmail contacts and email search resembles that of google as a search engine. No other comes near.

Still there is a lot of opportunity to improve this. PG wrote a list of top ten products in which search was first and email was second. Sparrow might have been a good effort. Let's see when it evolves further.